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One of the best duets I’ve seen and heard in a long time. I don’t know much about Sara Bareilles (except apparently she’s an a cappella singer who made it big), but she and Rivers sound great.

Weezer has really become one of the most creative bands out there — check out the AOL Sessions stuff. Chamillionaire, Kenny G (yes, it’s true), covers of MGMT, Green Day, Coldplay and even Lady Gaga. Plus, Rivers’ chorus on B.o.B’s Magic is awesome.

Feb

08

2011

If you’re running an installation of WordPress multisite or Buddypress, where the main site has a different look and feel than the network of sites, you’ve likely registered some widget areas that are only necessary for the main site.

The issue, however, is that your network of sites see these widget areas (that they can’t use) in their Widget editor. And if you’ve created a lot of widget areas that their design doesn’t use, you’re likely confusing your users with unnecessary choices.

So if you want to have widget areas available for your main site and not your network, use this easy fix.

In your functions.php file (where you register the widget areas), simply add this line of code:

global $blog_id;
if( $blog_id == ‘1’ ) {

REGISTER YOUR WIDGET AREA HERE

}

And that’s it. You can put as many widget areas in this code block as you want.

If you want to register certain widget areas for your network and not the main site, simply change == ‘1’ to !==’1′.

If you want to register certain widget areas for specific blogs, simply change the blog_id to the ID of the blog where it should appear.

Feb

02

2011

No, I didn’t do anything bad with my blog, like plagiarize or defame someone (or is it libel? I can never remember). But I recently got an offer to sell Automatic Finances, the blog and ebook I created in 2009 and sort of stopped posting to in mid-2010. (I’m not selling it, but that’s another story.)

It got me thinking, though, that I’ve done all the right things to have a successful blog: great content, great people contributing, a great topic, a great community and plenty of ideas. But, like this blog, it’s missing the one thing that builds on that success: regular posts.

It’s so easy to give up on a blog, or to become inconsistent in posting, or just push it to the back-burner for the time-being.

The longer a blog exists, the more value it has, especially from a Google/SEO perspective. And the real shame is that — and this is 100% true for Automatic Finances — most blog owners give up on their blogs right around the time the site starts to gain traction in search engine rankings. (I have no research to back that up … just conjecture. But it sounds right.)

If I had simply continued posting on a regular basis, the blog would have snowballed. More content, more comments, more dollars, more visitors, etc. It’s not a 100% ROI — doubling your posts doesn’t double your revenues — but it is all about momentum. The more you build on it, the more it produces.

There’s no secret to a successful blog, but it’s almost guaranteed that if you produce, so will your blog, either in revenues or traffic or comments. Keeping at it is the hard part, and it’s the part we tend to fail at the most.

I certainly can’t promise that 2011 is going to be a banner year for me blogging. I would like it to be, but it’s certainly very easy for life to get in the way.